Related papers: Neural Ideal Point Estimation Network
Modeling the ideological perspectives of political actors is an essential task in computational political science with applications in many downstream tasks. Existing approaches are generally limited to textual data and voting records,…
Modeling the ideological perspectives of political actors is an essential task in computational political science with applications in many downstream tasks. Existing approaches are generally limited to textual data and voting records,…
Ideal point models analyze lawmakers' votes to quantify their political positions, or ideal points. But votes are not the only way to express a political position. Lawmakers also give speeches, release press statements, and post tweets. In…
We develop a model of issue-specific voting behavior. This model can be used to explore lawmakers' personal voting patterns of voting by issue area, providing an exploratory window into how the language of the law is correlated with…
Spatial voting models of legislators' preferences are used in political science to test theories about their voting behavior. These models posit that legislators' ideologies as well as the ideologies reflected in votes for and against a…
In the face of adverse motives, it is indispensable to achieve a consensus. Elections have been the canonical way by which modern democracy has operated since the 17th century. Nowadays, they regulate markets, provide an engine for modern…
Understanding political polarization on social platforms is important as public opinions may become increasingly extreme when they are circulated in homogeneous communities, thus potentially causing damage in the real world. Automatically…
Social media platforms are rife with politically charged discussions. Therefore, accurately deciphering and predicting partisan biases using Large Language Models (LLMs) is increasingly critical. In this study, we address the challenge of…
Adoption of deep neural networks in fields such as economics or finance has been constrained by the lack of interpretability of model outcomes. This paper proposes a generative neural network architecture - the parameter encoder neural…
Political science, and social science in general, have traditionally been using computational methods to study areas such as voting behavior, policy making, international conflict, and international development. More recently, increasingly…
Imitation learning, which learns agent policy by mimicking expert demonstration, has shown promising results in many applications such as medical treatment regimes and self-driving vehicles. However, it remains a difficult task to interpret…
Predicting how Congressional legislators will vote is important for understanding their past and future behavior. However, previous work on roll-call prediction has been limited to single session settings, thus did not consider…
The large majority of inferences drawn in empirical political research follow from model-based associations (e.g. regression). Here, we articulate the benefits of predictive modeling as a complement to this approach. Predictive models aim…
State-space models are a popular statistical framework for analysing sequential data. Within this framework, particle filters are often used to perform inference on non-linear state-space models. We introduce a new method, StateMixNN, that…
The proliferation of deep neural networks in various domains has seen an increased need for the interpretability of these models, especially in scenarios where fairness and trust are as important as model performance. A lot of independent…
Quantification of the political leaning of online news articles can aid in understanding the dynamics of political ideology in social groups and measures to mitigating them. However, predicting the accurate political leaning of a news…
Deep Neural Nets (DNNs) learn latent representations induced by their downstream task, objective function, and other parameters. The quality of the learned representations impacts the DNN's generalization ability and the coherence of the…
Climate policy and legislation has a significant influence on both domestic and global responses to the pressing environmental challenges of our time. The effectiveness of such climate legislation is closely tied to the complex dynamics…
Natural data observed in $\mathbb{R}^n$ is often constrained to an $m$-dimensional manifold $\mathcal{M}$, where $m < n$. This work focuses on the task of building theoretically principled generative models for such data. Current generative…
Understanding political phenomena requires measuring the political preferences of society. We introduce a model based on mixtures of spatial voting models that infers the underlying distribution of political preferences of voters with only…